Archive for the 'How To' Category
Great open-source utility to recover lost Windows account passwords or to break into a locked machine.
In some cases, you can use special tools that reset your forgotten password (which I’ll write about in my up-coming posts..). but there are cases, where you don’t want to risk harming the system even more, or where you must [...]
So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.
The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn’t have another copy ready to go.
When I asked him why he didn’t back up his PST file regularly [...]
Hi boys and girls,
Do you remember when Ask The Admin covered a very interesting topic of Free Exchange services? For those who don’t, you can look here, here and sometimes here.
In a nutshell, this article talked about how me and my fiance’ had to plan our wedding and had tons of appointments flying in from [...]
Please follow this email chain between myself and our friend Karl AKA ATA.
—————————————ME
Here’s the scenario….
Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.
During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!
You know where this is going [...]
So you have the same repetitive searches you run every day? How about you let Google run the searches for you and hit you with any new sites that have popped up since your last search? This is great for almost anything! All the PR companies we deal with use this habitually.
Just go to http://www.Google.com/Alerts [...]
The title of this question here is a little misleading because you can use this little web app to serve lots of stuff besides quotes, like random ads or words of wisdom. Get your geek on and swap out scripts and images galore!Originally we used the free RandomQuote ASP generator to feed our geeky quotes [...]
If you have a hard drive of unknown origins there are times when you just can’t format it using the normal methods like an OS’s installer or Windows built in Disk Configuration Utility. NTFS’s good old security tries to do you dirty as well. It can be a real pain in the ass.
But AtA has [...]
I have this user who just got upgraded to a new laptop. When he logged in for the first time and opened Outlook, he was shocked. He said the fonts were way to small (Apparently he is as blind as a bat, or just likes larger fonts). Anyway, he called me to fix it.
If you [...]
So you don’t want to dole out the big bucks for some fancy smancy cd/dvd authoring suite just to burn cd’s and disk images? Or how about you don’t want the bloat from said suite?
No it’s probably that you are just like me and a big cheapskate when it comes to buying software!
Either which [...]
After figuring out I could edit Blogger blog posts from my mobile I decided to see what I could do with my TiVo while I am away. I went online and did some research. I found this tid-bit from Dave Zatz (Sling Media) and gave it a shot.Allow me to bring you kids up to [...]
So am I the last one to know that you can do FULL out blogger administration via Windows Mobile 6? I had set up a post email account a while back that let me type an email send it off and it would be saved as a draft ( you can set it to post [...]
Good weekend kiddies,
Comodore64 back again to shed some light for any newly ordained Mac users that are carrying over from the M$ world. Since Mac is gaining a kind of strangle hold on the industry, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of guys like myself who have a PC for certain purposes and a [...]
Hey everyone! Scott here from AndroidGuys, doing a little guest blogging today for AskTheAdmin. Thanks to Karl and the other guys for allowing me the opportunity to reach out and talk with his audience.
A common concern with bloggers is where they show up on a Google search and there’s a good reason for [...]
Adam Pash covered this tiny app on LifeHacker a while back. This Resizeable goodness is ever so cleverly called resizeenable and it lets you resize system windows that you normally could not. You guys always seem to find what I am looking for before I’m looking for it! Thanks LifeHacker…
Some of you may wonder why [...]
From AtA’s earlier days:
Reader Elizabeth (who knew we had so many female readers!) wrote to us that she moved her Word document off the screen so she can only see the bottom half of it.
She didn’t save it and can not move or close it. We have all done this before, moving windows around willey [...]
So we flopped around Google’s website yesterday and stared in disbelief as the only answer to backup or export your data still seemed like a crappy work-a-round.
But it looks like WordPress one up’ed Google’s Blogger by adding an Import feature to their WordPress 2.0!
It also works with LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType.
It only works with NEW [...]
Hey Kidlings,Commodore 64 here with a quick how to in photoshop. Have you ever downloaded an image you’d like to use on your website but it was sandwiched on top of some ghastly color which totally doesnt fit with your “flow”? Well here is a quick, no-frills, way to a transparent image that you can [...]
Hey boys and girls!
Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could sync calendars with somebody who is seemingly unconnected? On top of that, you wished that somehow, by some magical force, those calendars can sync automatically, wirelessly and invisibly; involving no further effort beyond the initial configuration, and that this calendar [...]
The title of this question here is a little misleading because you can use this little web app to serve lots of stuff besides quotes like random ads or words of wisdom. Get your geek on and swap out scripts and images galore!Originally we used the free RandomQuote ASP generator to feed our geeky quotes [...]
Johnathan from Minnesota writes in:
My IT manager uses Office XP aka 2002. His outlook pst just touched over 2gb. It happened while Outlook was opened and it closed. He couldn’t open it again. I looked up the error message on Microsoft and they said Outlook XP (and outlook 2000) can not recognize a pst larger [...]
Mark O’Neil from MakeUseOf and GeeksAreSexy put us onto a method of running an installer in a “Safe Space” using the Run As command (Via protect my computer and data from unauthorized program activity check box).
This is a great method for running programs that might be a little suspicious. That little check box prevents the [...]
So this question bounced around in my head for a bit last night. It seems Rafael wants Firefox 2 to open 3 tabs with different websites on launch. In essence dude wants 3 home pages concurrently. I’m with it… Wait theres more!
He wants to do it without an extension, plugin or other point of failure [...]
If you have a NTFS partition from Windows 2000, XP or Vista there are times when you can not format it using the normal methods like another OS’s installer. It can be a real pain in the ass. But AtA has been through this MANY MANY times and we know of an old school solution [...]
A few days ago I was trying to set up WordPress on my domain and since it’s in Hungarian – Fantastico my webhost’s auto-installer couldn’t quite cope with it. I needed to install it manually.
At the end of the process I got a random password. Of course the inevitable happened. I forgot to change it [...]
I Did something pretty cool the other day that I think AtA readers will appreciate.
I Had a hard drive die on a guy in the accounting department. Lets just say he does payroll for the company and I still want to get paid!
Cyclical redundancy check failed was the message. BSD on boot, all that jazz.
Yikes….Used [...]
Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the holiday season is upon us. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg for your slide shows… We just couldn’t have that now, [...]
If you are like reader Miguel and you want to reboot your Windows XP or Vista machine from a .bat file, here is the command to do it:
shutdown -r -f -t 0
LifeHacker showed you this command here advertising it as a fast shutdown command.
shutdown -f -t 0
Be warned – it forces apps to close even [...]
I have recently fallen in love with having outlook run batch files depending on what an email from me to me says.
They say necessity is the mother of all inventions and it is certainly true. I have been using a WM 6 device with no blackberry support and popping a pop3 account on the run. [...]
Craig was a little confused last night and very agitated. He wanted to know where his Run command was on his Vista Ultimate machine.
You know it used to be on the start menu in Xp. You can still bring it up by hitting Windows-R but, you want it back where it belongs – on your [...]
We get a lot of emails from people about why their new office 2007 files end in a X. People have sent in questions asking about why their files are in the archive format or formated for Mac OS X…
Microsoft has introduced new file types in 2007 (The X Stands for XML) if all you [...]
Jacob asked us if he could reference a whole cell range by label in excel. He continued on with how much easier it would make his life. Jacob today’s your lucky day because it looks like you can!
Thanks to LifeHacker for the answer to this one. You can reference a column by its header or [...]
So you have the same repetitive searches you run every day? How about you let Google run the searches for you and hit you with any new sites that have popped up since your last search? This is great for almost anything! All the PR companies we deal with use this habitually.
Just go to http://www.Google.com/Alerts [...]
So am I the last one to know that you can do FULL out blogger administration via Windows Mobile 6? I had set up a post email account a while back that let me type an email send it off and it would be saved as a draft ( you can set it to post [...]
Please follow this email chain between myself and our friend Karl AKA ATA.
—————————————ME
Here’s the scenario….
Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.
During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!
You know where this is going [...]
I have been using Digg.com for quite a while now, and have only recently begun to understand how it is that Digg really works. So many times I have submitted a blog post from Bauer-Power, only to get one or two diggs, then have it fall off into oblivion.
It was only recently that I discovered [...]
Hi boys and girls,
Do you remember when Ask The Admin covered a very interesting topic of Free Exchange services? For those who don’t, you can look here, here and sometimes here.
In a nutshell, this article talked about how me and my fiance’ had to plan our wedding and had tons of appointments flying in from [...]
How can i get more traffic to my blog-site? What attracts readers to a blog? Will you look at my site Mr. Admin?
This one I’ll field myself right off the bat because I have tried everything, and I mean everything. I have stayed up late nights and worked on traffic, and only traffic, for days [...]
Adam Pash covered this tiny app on this wonderful Thanksgiving morning. It is called resizeenable and it lets you resize system windows that you normally could not. You guys always seem to find what I am looking for before I’m looking for it! Thanks LifeHacker…
Some of you may wonder why we are so anal-retentive that [...]
It’s very annoying and counter productive for your hands to leave the keyboard as you use your mouse to click, click, clickity click click away at something. Join the ranks of power users to add keyboard shortcuts for every computer task you do. Yup Any Task!
Built into Windows is the ability to let you assign [...]
Reader Joanne wrote to us that she moved her Word document off the screen so she can only see the bottom half of it. She didn’t save it and can not move or close it. We have all done this before, moving windows around willey nilley to see whats behind it or just for fun [...]
I have this user who just got upgraded to a new laptop. When he logged in for the first time and opened Outlook, he was in for a shock. The fonts were extremely small (Apparently he is as blind as a bat, and likes larger fonts). Anyway, he called me to fix it.
If you run [...]
So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.
The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn’t have another copy ready to go.
When I asked him why he didn’t back up his PST file regularly [...]
So you have the same repetitive searches you run every day? How about you let Google run the searches for you and hit you with any new sites that have popped up since your last search? This is great for almost anything!
Just go to http://www.Google.com/Alerts and sign up for an “Alert”. this is what will [...]
I had been using Celetask to do quick one button reboots but my trial expired and I really could not justify $7.95 just to reboot easier. User Maevro over at Howard Forums created a .cab file that adds a Reboot option to your Windows Mobile Device Quick List. Thats the one you get by [...]
I will keep this as broad as possible to help a wide range of people. If you need more specific help please leave us a comment and it WILL be answered.
So you have decided that either something inside your shinny laptop is broken and needs to be fixed or you want to upgrade something (memory, [...]
I just saw a Washington Post reporter who accidentally dropped his Blackberry in the toilet was able to retrieve it and dry it out to working order again: by leaving it turned off in a bowl of uncooked rice.
One of the commenters said:
for a better desiccant, it’d be a good idea to store all those [...]
So it looks like Microsoft has heard us belly aching and now has released a fix. I will not be applying it until I either see more issues or read otherwise. Here is the information – you decide:
You receive an access violation error and the system may appear to become unresponsive when you try to [...]
SpyDawn at first glance may look like a legitimate application for the removal of spyware, but it’s really a malicious program that issues fake warnings in an attempt to trick you into buying SpyDawn. SpyDawn may secretly install and automatically download itself onto your computer.
>> For SpyDawn Manual Removal, continue on reading. (Some technical knowledge [...]
SpyDawn at first glance may look like a legitimate application for the removal of spyware, but it’s really a malicious program that issues fake warnings in an attempt to trick you into buying SpyDawn. SpyDawn may secretly install and automatically download itself onto your computer.
>> For SpyDawn Manual Removal, continue on reading. (Some technical knowledge [...]
I love using Experts Exchange: an online forum to find technical information that is usually buried elsewhere. I have never purchased a login from them and have a free account. If you search they will sometimes give you an answer without paying, but as soon as you click a link BANG pay up.
Check out this [...]
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